Many thanks to all of you who responded either directly or via the
list to my request for a name for the @ symbol. A summary (!) follows:
"commercial at" - apparently the ITU-T (International
Telecommunications Union) preferred name and the one that my printer
uses.
A couple of people mentioned an article on this very subject that
appeared in the Independent a couple of years ago where the best
description was the French one (le petit escargot). I tracked this
down, not via the Web but through old fashioned command line access to
the IDPT file on DataStar. For those of you wish to read the original
the reference is:
So what do you call the @ thing?, Tim Nott, The Independent, Tuesday
22 January 1996, p10
A follow up appeared in
Bits & Bytes: An @ by any other name, The Independent, Tuesday
5 February 1996, p 9
Other names that have been mentioned include:
Germany - Klammeraffe (spider monkey)
Netherlands - api short for apestaart (monkey's or ape's tail - the
latter as one person pointed out being biologically improbable)
Italy - chiocciolina (little snail)
Norway - kanel-bolle (those delicious spiral cinnamon buns!)
But a mention in despatches must go to Alison Holder, EARL Information
Officer who pulled these together (and added a few more) with a
reference to FOLDOC (Free On-Line Dictionary Of Computing, at
http://wombat.doc.ic.ac.uk/foldoc/index.html) which has the following
offering:
"@ --> commercial at
<character> "@". Common names: at sign; at; strudel. Rare: each;
vortex; whorl; INTERCAL: whirlpool; cyclone; snail; ape; cat; rose;
cabbage; ITU-T: commercial at.
The @ sign is used in electronic mail addresses to separate the local
part from the hostname. See @-party."
-------------------------
Karen Blakeman, RBA Information Services
Internet Training,Consultancy and Publications
Tel:/Fax: 0118 947 2256, E-Mail:[log in to unmask]
Business Information on the Net: http://www.rba.co.uk/sources/
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